Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction by David Riddle Watson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction by David Riddle Watson Clare Rolens David Riddle Watson, Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 235 pp. Detective fiction criticism often views a detective's ability to absolutely solve the mystery as problematic or banal. The Hercule Poirots of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is argued, provide closure that reinforces a dominant order, and serve as a foil in studies of more dynamic, subversive detectives. The scholar of detective fiction tends to be wary of a mystery tied up in a neat little package. David Riddle Watson, in Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction, begs to differ. Outlining the merits of closure and restoration of order, Watson's argument betrays a nostalgia not for the particular order that Victorian and Golden Age detectives restored, but for any order at all. Whereas Poe's Dupin and Conan Doyle's Holmes lived in a world where detective, sidekick, police, and suspects could agree on a stable sense of truth, contemporary America is fractured into competing versions of reality without a shared consensus on what is true, or even what is truth. We need to be better detectives, the aptly named Watson suggests. Watson is worried not just about consensus concerning the philosophical nature of truth as a theoretical exercise, but about the survival of our democracy. The book investigates the concept of truth from the first modern detective stories in the 1840s to the January 6 assault on the Capitol Building in 2021. The remarkable preface begins with the author enduring a long stay in the hospital. With little to do but watch the news, worry about the state of the nation, and contemplate the dissertation that he wasn't sure he'd ever get to finish, it came to him: "I would use detective novels as a way to discuss … the assumptions that were being made about truth throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. In this way, the texts were picked as a means to explore a philosophical argument about the truth that I want to make" (ix). This last point is important; the book's focus is narrative representations of the search for truth that can help us understand how we have moved into a post-truth mind-set. Indeed, American detective "fiction" named in the title also misses one of the strengths of the book, that is, compelling interpretation of fictional and non-fictional detection as connected. The impressively ambitious project provides a short history of truth according to major philosophers. Watson connects this history to elements of arguably the first modern detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and especially those starring C. Auguste Dupin. "Detectives model the search for truth" (2), and we can see how ideas have changed throughout literary periods "moving from one end of the spectrum where truth is conceived of as a certainty, to the other end, where truth is considered [End Page 501] relative to the interpreter's desires" (23) in the contemporary era. There is overlap; postmodern ideas show up in the margins of modernism, and vice versa. But a common understanding of truth allows the non-postmodern Dupin to access "the interior lives of others" to reach a solution, continuing to a lesser degree even up to the hard-boiled school in the 1930s. Moving to the 1950s, Watson argues that two particular elements of the early Cold War, namely, "the compartmentalization of knowledge along with the classification of state secrets," fueled a growing distrust in government, whose "every statement must be interpreted ironically, as every potential signal, could in fact be noise" (47). This culture of doubt and suspicion is evident in the anti-Communist Mickey Spillane, as well as in the more recent work of journalistic detection, Nicholson Baker's Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act. In the 1960s we find emphasis on the role of language in postmodern narratives of detection, or more often, anti-detection. In the hands of Thomas Pynchon, "truth itself is no longer a thing that is found or discovered...